The main guide for this research can be found at A Guide to Spiritual Gifts

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

The Gift of Administration

As with the gifts of helps and service, it is necessary to distinguish the gifts of administration and leadership:
Administrators, in contrast to the leaders and idea people, are the doers. They know how to put into effect the ideas the leaders have developed. To use a common expression, they tend to be the nuts and bolts people. Administrators have an amazing ability to bring into being what the leaders have conceived, and once it is brought into being, to see that it continues to operate in a smooth way.[1]

Kroeger and Thuesen call the ESTJs “Life’s Administrators,” and they note the ease at which they perform this task:
It is as natural and inborn for ESTJs to manage (although not necessarily to lead) as it is for a fish to swim...their inherent administrative skills make the family, the work force, the neighborhood, the church, or any other group appropriate arenas, for them to administer and manage.[2]

Isabel Meyers records an interesting anecdote illustrating the ESTJ connection with administration:
Especially pleasing was the remark made by an unforgettable person. She was the head of a school of nursing, serenely lovely in the white habit of her order. With her eyes on the Type Table, she listened attentively to a two-minute explanation of type. Then putting her finger on ESTJ in the lower left corner, she said, ‘These are the administrators. She was right, but how could she have known? She must have looked at the four letters of that type, selected from the brief explanation the salient characteristics associated with each letter, and put them together into a recognizable portrait: attention focused on the outside world; respect for facts and capacity for detail; judgments based on cause and effect; and immediate decision—administrators.[3]

Summary: For each of the sixteen personality types there is a theme or set of related themes that run through the various descriptions of that type. The dominant theme of the ESTJ is administrating or supervising. The ESTJ personality type is therefore an excellent match with the gift of administration and is one of the easiest to support.

References

[1] Donald Hohensee and Allen Odell, Your Spiritual Gifts (Wheaton, Il.: Victor, 1992), 99.

[2] Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen, Type Talk (New York: Broadman Press, 1988), 265.

[3] Isabel B. Myers, Gifts Differing (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1980), 172.

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